mers, Rothschilds, Barings, Clarks, Coates, Crossleys, the Browns, Siemens, Cammels, Gillotts, Whitworths, the Armstrongs, Listers, the Salts, Bairds, Samuelsons, Howards, Bells, and others. Joint-stock companies have not yet proven themselves equal to properly manage business after such men have created it. Where they have succeeded, it will be found that a very few individuals, and generally but one, have still control of affairs. Joint-stock companies cannot be credited with invention or enterprise. If it were not for the millionaire still in business leading the way, a serious check would fall upon future improvement, and I believe business men generally will concur in the opinion, which I very firmly hold, that partnership-a very few, not more than two or three men-in any line of business, will make full interest upon the capital invested; while a similar concern as a joint-stock company, owned by many in small amounts, will scarcely pay its way and is very likely to fail. Railroads may occur to some as examples of joint-stock management, but the same rule applies to these. America has most of the railroads of the world, and it is found whenever a few able men control a line, and make its management their personal affair, that dividends are earned, where before there were none. The railways of Britain being monopolies, and charging from two to three times higher rates for similar service than those of America, only manage to pay their share holders a sinal return. It would be quite another story if these were the property or two able men and inanaged

of one by them. The "promotion'' of an individual into a joint-stock concern is precisely what the promotion" of the individual is from the House of Commons to the House of Lords. The push and masterdom, the initiative of the few owners, which have created the business, are replaced by the limited authority and regulation perform ance of routine duties by salaried officials, after "" promotion," while the career of both concern and individual may continue respectable, it is necessarily dull. They are no longer in the race; the great work of both is over. It would not be well for Britain's future if her commercial and manufacturing supremacy depended upon joint-stock companies. It is her individ

ual millionaires who have created this supremacy, and upon them its maintenance still depends. Those who insure steady employment to thousands at wages not lower than others pay, need not be ashamed of their record; for steady employment is, after all, the one indispensable requisite for the welfare and the progress of the people. Still I am neither concerned nor disposed to dispute Mr. Hughes's assertion, that in a State under really Christian principles a millionaire would be an impossibility. He may be right; it is a far guess ahead. But the millionaire will not lack good company in making his exit; for surely nothing is clearer than that, in the ideal day, there can be no further use whatever for those of Mr. Hughes's profession. The millionaire and the preacher will alike have to find some other use for their talents; some other work to do that they may honorably earn and eat their daily bread. In this I doubt not both will continue to be eminently successful. The successors of the Rev. Mr. Hughes and myself, arın in arm, will make a pretty pair out in search of some light work with heavy pay.

Upon speculations as to the future of the race involving revolutionary change of existing conditions, it seems unwise to dwell. I think we have nothing whatever to do with what may come a thousand or a million years hence; and none of us can know what will come our duties lie with the present-with our day and generation, and even these are hard enough to discern. The race toils slowly upward step by step; it has even to create each successive step before it can stand upon it, for

Nature is made better by no mean ; But nature makes that mean.

If it attempts to bound over intervening space to any ideal, it will not rise but fall to lower depths. I cannot therefore but regard such speculations a waste of time

of valuable time-which is imperatively required for dealing with the next step possible in the path upward. And it is in this light that Mr. Gladstone's suggestion is of the greatest value. It accepts and builds upon present conditions-accommodates itself to our present environments. Mr. Gladstone has been engaged during his long public career in focussing, as it were, the various wishes of others, and so

grouping them for a common end that practical results might follow. It has been his mission to restrain extremes, and to unite in common action the advance, the centre, and the rear. He shows his rare constructive skill in suggesting that there should be formed a brotherhood of those who recognize their duties to their fellows less favored with this world's goods. This society will, no doubt, be so wide as to admit all, no limit being put to the amount of percentage of his surplus which each can secretly resolve to devote to others, nor any interference attempted with the wide field of its application. We may expect kindred societies to be formed throughout the world, and, at intervals, delegates from these might meet together in one world-wide brotherhood, thereby strengthening each other in the desire and effort to do their best to improve the condition of the masses, and to bring rich and poor into closer union. Those who ask, "not how much we ought to give away, but how much we dare retain, " would represent the advanced section. Passing from this through many gradations, those who still fondly plead for the continued hereditary transmission of wealth and position, and for

All

magnificence in station, would constitute the other great wing of the army. equally welcome, equally necessary-it being enough that members of the brotherhood feel the duty of the day is that, entrusted as they are with surplus wealth beyond their wants as their conscience may determine these wants they should regularly set apart and expend all, or a proportion greater or less of the remainder, for the good of their less fortunate fellows, in the manner which seems to each best calculated to promote their genuine improvement. Should Mr. Gladstone's suggestion find the response which it deserves, he will have added much to the usefulness of his life in a sphere happily far removed from and far above the political; a field in which there can be room neither for strife, jealousy, gain, nor personal ambition; a cause so high, so holy, that all its surroundings must breathe of peace, good-will, brotherhood!

Every earnest good man, anxious to leave the world a little better than he found it, will wish Mr. Gladstone Godspeed in his new inspiring task-a task which is indeed "too great for haste, too high for rivalry."-Nineteenth Century.

IT was an American who told an interviewer that he humbly hoped, in his better moods, for a future state in which there should be less friction and no editors; and the feeling which dictated that biting remark is growing deeper. Cultivated Americans begin so keenly to hate the system of excessive publicity, which they themselves have been mainly instrumental in producing, that they are discussing ways and means of restricting it by legal penalties. The Harvard Law Review is even inclined to hold, though not, we imagine, with any great certainty, that the existing law of Massachusetts, which is in substance English law, would, if fairly interpreted, afford means of punishing intrusions on private life. We fear that is an illusion even in theory, although the proviso that a libel, to be justified, must be for the intercst of the community, was doubtless intended to have some such consequence, and, as the Nation points out,

it certainly is one in practice. The power of protecting privacy certainly does not appertain to Magistrates, and ordinary juries could never be trusted to give the law effect. The Judge might charge as he liked, but if the statement made interested the ordinary juryman, he would hold that the person interfered with was not for the time being a private person at all, but one whose actions and demeanor, and words and clothes and furniture, were, during a certain period of time, of importance to the public. "There was much excitement in the parish" about him, and therefore he was a public character. That would be any counsel's sufficient excuse for the defendant, and it would be well for the prosecutor if he escaped damaging imputations as to his secret motives for bringing such an action. It is just as true here as in America, though there may be some difference of degree, that the real cause of the disap

pearance of privacy is the dislike and suspicion of it felt by that majority which elects legislators and fills the jury-box. In an era like the present, when theoretica! equality co-exists with ever widening differences of real position, the majority resent the love of privacy as a form of desire for privilege, and feel toward any one who retires before their curiosity as their superiors feel toward any one who, without reason assigned, declines to see them when they call. The Russell family were recently treated almost as public offenders because some of them wished that the details of a relative's suicide should not be made needlessly public; and though that relative was a Duke, the popular judgment that any desire for privacy must have either an ill motive or an insolent motive, is not restricted to Dukes. To live an unusually retired life is, even in the middle class, to become an object of suspicion, and among working-inen to incur an unpopularity which does not always confine itself to cutting or reproving words. A workman who "" keeps himself to himself" in too marked a degree is regarded as "uppish" and "over-particular"; and if his fellows can play him some trick, half humorous and half savage, he may be sure they will. The old Californian custom under which, if a stranger asked you to drink with him, you had just three alternatives-to drink with him, to plead total abstinence, or to be shot-does not prevail here, though it is considered excessively rude to refuse a drink offered by a superior; but the sentiment which produced that grotesque etiquette is beginning to prevail so extensive ly, that in a few years it will be an offence to wall-in a garden, or put up a gate-house to a park-usually an honorable method of pensioning a worn-out servant-or to refuse an invitation to a public entertainment. Already we see it stated in democratic publications that in a well-ordered social system, a citizen elected to a public office must accept it or be ostracizedimagine Tennyson as a vestryman -and the man who declines to be "interviewed," that is, to be subjected for half an hour to impertinent questions at the discretion of a man he never saw before, is held to be either ashamed of himself, or to be capable of an insolent disregard of the rights of his fellow-men. The public wants to know" something or other which it has no earthly right to

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know, or even to feel curious about; and before that unrighteous claim every wall is to go down and every veil to be lifted. Nobody can be horsewhipped nowadays for asking why a man changed his faith, what his income is, or why he married his wife, and even a frown at impertinent questions is set down as evidence, not of self-respect, but of ill-concealed bad temper. There is a horror of reserve and of seclusion, which manifests itself at every opportunity, and begins, we suspect, to infect even the cultivated, who, and not the multitude, have invented, as a term of reproach, the uncouth, word unclubbable."

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The results of this spirit, which is essen-. tially an excessively vulgar form of spite, seclusion being regarded as a superiority, are, of course, entirely bad, the first consequence being to repel from civic life those who could do most to enlighten, and therefore benefit, the community, and to confine activity to the pushing and the brazen, who are generally, though with exceptions, inferior men; but we do not want to repeat that much-repeated truth to-day, the rather that we believe the tyranny will become acute, and, like most acute tyrannies, will be short-lived. What interests us more is the speculation as to the form that the insurrection of the retiring, when the time has arrived, will take. There is little hope, as we have observed, from legal remedies-though conceivably the right of seclusion may be a little better protected by a fine on the man who refuses to leave a house or garden on its owner's demand-for juries will disregard the law, which, again, would have to be made so stringent that everybody would be guilty, and it would defeat itself; nor do we expect to see among English-speaking peoples a censorship of the Press. It is true Robespierre intended, as is clear from the papers he left behind, to establish some such systein, and the Socialists, if they triumph, will certainly hang a majority of journalists, some for " anti-social" opinions, and some for refusing to work under compulsion; but democracies are like Kings, and will hold all who flatter them sufficiently to be at least well-intentioned. Nor do we suppose that the old right of private vengeance on the traducer will revive, for the traducers now have the wealth of nobles, and could keep armed guards; and be

sides, the juries, who are becoming the Courts, are secretly on their side. The remedy, we fancy, will be a non-material one, and though it will be effective, we are not sure that far-sighted men will altogether approve it. It will consist in a certain hardening of the heart of the whole cultivated class, and, indeed, of all men capable of separate opinions, leading them to repeat Mr. Vanderbilt's celebrated anathema, which, when first reported, shocked the democrats of New York as blasphemy fit to call down fire from the skies, "Damu the public !" Men will train themselves, and be trained, to disregard an over-obtrusive public opinion-as the Roman patricians must have done, or they could not have been so contemptuously tolerant of abuse-to live their own lives, regarding only law; and when they speak, either to address only intimates, or to utter their own thoughts regardless of the masses they may shock. The Stoic philosophy will be applied to social life, and external influences treated as things to be despised. The billionaire will drink pearls if he likes in the central marketplace; and the poor man of science will prove, if that is the result of his thinking, that the way to improve the world is to execute all families with hereditary proclivities toward crime, pauperism, indolence, or overmuch fondness for alcoholic drinks. Courage, which never decays wholly in a strong race, will take the form of resistance to dictation, seclusion will be secured by material means, and the credit of heroism will be sought in utter independence of the will of the majority so long as it is not "sanctioned," like boycotting, by prodigious sentences. Selfwill will again become an admired quality, and we shall have many a Coriolanus in public and Diogenes in private life. Public opinion cannot do much to the solid billionaire if he chooses to go his own way and build a city for himself, and nothing

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at all to Thoreau when he has once accommodated his constitution to biscuits and the early damp of a European wood. We see strong signs of that revulsion of feel. ing in the United States, where already opinion" is losing its hold, and some signs here, especially in literature; and it will, if it prevails, undoubtedly breed a stronger-minded race of men. It is nonsense to say that such independence of mind cannot be, for it has been exhibited by Christians in all ages, has made heroes of plain men like John Brown, and is exhibited every day-usually, we quite admit, in a cantankerous form-in every town of England and America. The cure would, as we said, be effectual; but if this be the method, we shall buy it at a very long and impoverishing price. We surrender with the bad influence the healthy influence of public opinion, the strongest instrument for good, when wisely employed, which civilized man has yet discovered. It is a very terrible and undiscriminating instrument, and by no means so free from "blood-guiltiness" as its admirers assert-the next great war will be mainly produced by French or Russian public opinion-but still it is a wonderful power, and the only one which has reached, or rather, tried to reach, for it has not reached them yet, the dark places of the earth, the habitations of cruelty. It is a pity to give up such a weapon just because it is abused; yet it will be given up if this is to be the form taken by the insurrection against the odious tyranny of publicity now extending itself over the whole civilized world. That the insurrection will come in some form, we have no manner of doubt. Men will not consent forever to live under the microscope, especially when half those who use it value it only for the purpose of gaining money by human vivisection.-The Spec

tator.

THE death of Meissonier, which took place last Saturday, removes a most important personality from the art-world of Europe. Although in a few days the master would have completed his eightieth year, his power and skill had scarcely

abated; the vigorous little old man, with the vast white beard which made him look like a river-god in miniature, still kept the world about him in a turmoil with his energy and his martial fervor. The place which he had gained as the undisputed

leader and president of French art had not been won without a lifelong struggle. In the laudatory notices of Meissonier's life which have appeared this week, in France as well as in this country, that fact has scarcely been alluded to, so completely in the glory of success are the disappointments of the past forgotten. But it is worth recollecting that so lately as 1861 Meissonier was elected into the Academy by a narrow majority over a certain M. Hesse, now forgotten, who was then the favorite with the critics; that later than this it was the custom to mention his name in the same breath with costume painters such as Fichel and Plassan; and that in 1864 the jurors positively refused the grande médaille to him at the Salon.

It was the conviction that this great painter desired, above all things else, to glorify French art, and to prove himself a sincere patriot, which won for Meissonier that astonishing popularity which his old age achieved. There were wonderful legends about him, and some of them have now proved to have been true. M. Antonin Proust has written this week to a French paper to say that it is literally historic that on the 8th of September, 1870, Meissonier went to Gambetta and asked to be made military prefect of Metz. Whether he would have served France with success if this request had been granted may be doubtful, but certainly his training, his audacity, and the breadth of his conceptions might have made an excellent amateur fighting general of him. Gambetta, at all events, never ceased to try to make use of Meissonier in public life, and we now learn that the gifts of "Le Graveur à l'eau-forte" and "L'Attente" to the French nation were made in compliment to that statesman in November, 1881. We may, however, on the whole, be glad that, in spite of all temptations to adorn other vocations, Meissonier remained from first to last simply a painter.

His work has come to be considered as the highest expression of a certain view of nature which is far from being as limited as some critics have alleged. It is true that Meissonier is not a colorist. That word cannot be used of a painter who obtains his effects by the positive elimination of color, whose reds are deliberately rendered by mud-tints, and his blues and greens by greys. But in most other directions his characteristics are so wide as

almost to defy criticism. In light, in tone, in veracity of impression, in completeness of knowledge, he has no rival, even among those masters of the Low Countries whom he loved to emulate. The microscopic proportions of his pictures, his fondness for seventeenth and eighteenth-century costumes, the realism that shocked his early critics, are no longer looked upon as detracting anything from his merit; for all eccentricities may easily be forgiven to an observation so precise and a touch so broad and true. His realisin has always been inspired by great thoughts; it has never been vulgar nor mediocre. There are, perhaps, no French pictures of forty years ago which bave suffered so little from the change of fashion as those of Meissonier.

His artistic conscience, as has been well said, was inexorable. For his great effects be trusted neither to memory nor to construction, but, at vast expense and under extreme difficulties, insisted on working from nature. When he was painting "1807, "1807," he bought a cornfield, and hired a troop of cuirassiers to gallop over it, he himself riding at their side and noting the attitudes of men and horses. Then, and not until the field was in the right condition of corn ruined by cavalry, did Meissonier sit down before it to paint his middle distance. A similar story is told of the ploughed and snow-covered field in "1814. It was his artistic conscience which led him, as long ago as 1830, to break with the convention of the classic school, and which kept him so consistently isolated from the passing fashions of French art for sixty years. No one has ever used the model so faithfully and sincerely, and it is this, his invariable vision of the man inside the doublet or the coat of mail, which distinguishes him from all the ephemeral host of mere painters of

costume.

It is an interesting fact that he has left on record which of all his innumerable productions he himself preferred. His list of his own four favorite pictures consists of "La Rixe," "1807," "L'Attente," and "Le Graveur à l'eau-forte," and the study of these alone would teach us what Meissonier was. In the first of these, "La Rixe"-the two young fellows flying at each other's throats, and scarcely held apart by their friends-w -we see Meissonier's gift for presenting violent action